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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is still an integral part of the online marketing process, as it makes it possible for engines to find your content and make it available to users.

And running a business means needed that traffic. The more people that land on your content, the higher the possibility of conversions.

But perfecting tags and headers isn’t enough these days. In a world of continuous content flow, you need to find ways to freshen up your SEO.

Let’s take a look at some helpful tips to level up your SEO and content marketing skills.

Understand What SEO Really Does & How

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the act of making your content easier to track online. Doing so makes you stand out against the competition, thus increasing traffic and search engine ranking. The higher your rank, the more likely it is you’ll wind up on the top of the first page of results (ultimate goal).

But have you ever thought of why you need to make your content more searchable? Doesn’t your content just need to be good?

Well, not exactly. There is a lot of content online these days, not all of it relevant to yours, but still. Even when speaking of your competition, you’re essentially talking about another indie developer’s or publisher’s website, social media accounts, blogs, forum posts, YouTube videos, store pages, etc. It can be plenty of information for just one competitor to have, let alone millions.

It might make you wonder how search engines actually function so quickly with that much information to sift through.

Understanding Search Engines

Search engines do two things: crawling and building an index. These two tasks are what give search engine users a ranked list of websites relevant to their specific search.

Much like a subway network, there are different stops for every type of documentation―web pages, PDFs, etc. This is why search engines need to “crawl” the whole city and find the specific type of documentation you’re looking for.

They do this by taking the best path available, links.

Once the automated robots find these documents, they have to analyze what’s in them, and file them accordingly. This makes it easier to find the information users search for without wasting time. Kind of like a library system.

To keep up with demand (think about everyone searching for something right now), search engine companies have created what are known as datacenters all over the world. These storage facilities hold machines that process these searches quickly.

When someone searches for anything, these bots go to work, providing instantaneous results. Even a 1-2 second delay is too much.

How SEO Meets Search Engines

Having empathy goes a long way, no matter what situation you’re in, and it’s no exception in business. Understanding what your audience needs and wants is crucial, not just because you want to help, but you want to make sure you’re making it easy to find online.

That’s where SEO comes in.

Search engines have one primary task and that is to provide relevant results to users in as little time as possible. The more you emphasize with your audience and know what it is they’re actively searching for, the better off you’ll be.

Suddenly, search engines will begin incorporating your relevant content to these specific inquiries from your target audience, and the more home runs you hit, the higher your rank.

And as trivial as that seems, it winds up meaning the world to a business. A study by Yahoo showed that users focus on the top left and center the most, with everything toward the bottom and too far right being essentially low priority. The higher your content ranks, the closer it is to that sweet top left.

Understand Search Engine Tools & Services

SEO tools are extensive, but some of the most useful are actually provided by search engines themselves. After all, they want you to create accessible, relevant content that they can track.

The more helpful their results list is at every turn, with every search from every possible user, the better they’re considered. And that helps them beat out the competition. There’s a reason everyone uses Google, but no one even thinks about Bing.

Take Google for instance, since we brought it up. How does Google help webmasters (you) rank higher in searches?

Google Webmaster Tools

Geographic Target - If a site targets users in a specific place, webmasters can provide Google with that information so as to make that site appear in country-specific search results.

Preferred Domain - The webmaster can select their preferred domain, making sure it’s indexed. Google will find a link to that site, just as it is typed and note it for future search results.

URL Parameters - Webmasters can also tell Google about certain parameters on their sites, such as “sort=price,” which makes it easier for Google to search for specific information. Think of it as a mutual benefit.

Crawl Rate - Affects the speed, but not the frequency, of Google’s requests during crawling.

Malware - Google lets you know when there are some major issues, such as malware on your website. Malware creates a bad user experience, and so search engines won’t want to refer your content (lower ranking).

Crawl Errors - Google will let you know when there are 404 errors and will report them. It hurts your ranking as well, but at least Google is letting you know so you can fix your redirecting issues.

HTML Suggestions - Google will look for search engine-unfriendly HTML elements, like poorly-written meta descriptions and tags. See? All those times you thought your tags and descriptions didn’t matter were missed opportunities!

Reevaluate Your Keyword Research

If you stop to think about it, SEO revolves entirely around a few words typed into a search box. It seems so simple, but in reality, there’s an entire system at work ready to make it happen at a moment’s notice.

As a webmaster of your own content, it’s your responsibility to meet search engines halfway. They provide you the opportunity to display your content. They even give you free tools to make it happen.

The most important way to do this is actually what makes SEO possible in the first place: keywords. Ranking for the right keywords can make or break your website. By researching your market’s keyword demand, you can learn which terms are ideal for your SEO goals, as well as what it is your customers really want to learn more about.

Rather than focus on getting more traffic, you need to focus on getting more of the right customers to your content.

Selecting Your Keyword(s)

It may seem impossible, selecting the right keywords to essentially summarize all of your content and make it highly searchable. But there is a step-by-step process you can follow. Plus, you only need to do this once, assuming you get it right the first time.

Ask yourself if the keyword(s) and your content go well together. Will people find what they’re looking for on your website when typing in those keywords?

Search for the term in major search engines to see what pops up. Does your content coexist here, or would it not make much sense? Also, how does your site compare in terms of quality?

Buy a sample campaign for the keyword at Google AdWords. Buying test traffic to see how well it converts is a good way to eliminate guesswork. Just make sure you track impressions and conversion rates over the course of at least 300 clicks.

Use the data to determine if your keywords need changing. After all is said and done, each one of these steps will let you know if you’re on the right track, or if you need to get a firmer grasp of what your audience is looking for.

Understand Your URL Structure

Think about your target audience and what their needs are. When they look at your URL, what will they see? If you can easily predict the content that will be on that page, you’re on the right track, but otherwise, you may need to rethink your URL.

Remember, shorter is better. Description is important, but making sure your email is easier to copy and paste into blog posts and text messages is what makes the whole thing visible.

The same goes for overusing keywords in post and page titles. Remember, linking to this content will generate its own URL. Overusing keywords will lead to less usable URLs, and may lead to spam filtering.

Remember the Four Pillars of Web Design

Your website needs to adhere to certain expectations, as you may already know. There are common knowledge ones, such as having a landing page, a contact page and a blog. But what if I told you everything needs to neatly meet four major needs?

Easy to use, navigate and understand.

Provide direct, actionable information that is relevant to the inquiry.

Professionally designed and accessible to even the most modern of users.

Deliver high quality, legitimate, and credible content.

In other words, your website could be gorgeous. But if it’s not easy to use, or doesn’t deliver relevant content, it’s still going to waste.

Covering All Forms of Search Intent

Ever stop to consider that maybe not everyone is searching for the same thing on your website? Just like everyone wants a different type of cupcake, different people want different types of content.

Transactional Searches - making a purchase or completing a task like signing up for a free trial, creating an account, or finding the best local Indian cuisine.

Navigational Searches - visiting a predetermined destination or sourcing a specific URL; these searches are performed with the intention of surfing specific content.

Let Go of Meta Tags

Seriously, it’s been spammed to death, and search engines had no other option than to discard this as a measure of SEO.

Instead focus on title tags, meta description tags, and keywords. Even the meta robots tag is important, because it controls crawler access.

Stop Keyword Stuffing

“Indie game development studio Calico is the best indie game development studio in the Seattle area. We make indie games at our studio in Seattle and focus on engaging, high-quality indie games.”

Notice anything weird?

This is copy designed for robots, not users, for one thing. And also, well, even the robots don’t like it. It’s a myth that keyword density matters.

In reality, keyword quality is all you need. Use your keywords as organically as possible, with usability in mind, so you don’t put off any humans or robots.

Transcribe Video Content

If you’re not already creating video content, it’s time to change that. In this day and age, if you have a creative business to showcase, a digital one, a physical one, or you sell services or products, then you need video content. Everyone does.

And the reasoning is simple: visuals have taken over. Everything from Instagram to YouTube is a visual. It provides entertainment or information quickly and efficiently, on demand. And it doesn’t involve reading walls after walls of text at every turn, which not everyone is going to do. Video is easier for the consumer.

But back to the point. Transcribing your video content and placing it underneath the video, in a post on your blog makes it possible for search engines to pick up essential keywords you’re (hopefully) trying to rank for.

Find Large Images to Reduce

Ever wonder if your images are making your website run super slow? Here’s a way to find your large images within Google image search, and then reduce them to keep site speed running smoothly.

And the process is simple. Simply go to Google Images and do a site search on your business, like “site:quicksprout.com.” Turn off Safe Search (right-hand side) so you’re sure you have all possible images. Then filter by size, you want images larger than 640x480.

See if you can spot images which at full size are much bigger than they need to be. Ideally, these are the images that are very big, like 1024x681. There’s a poor cropping job somewhere in there. Now you can save the image, edit it properly. Check out these free image optimization tools for image compression.

Run A Co-Marketing Campaign

In case you’re not aware of what it is, a co-marketing campaign is when two companies collaborate on promotional efforts for a co-branded offer. In this situation, both companies promote content, or a product, and then share the results of that promotion.

The reason it works so well is because your audience doubles, for both companies. And that helps drive leads, links, social engagement, etc.

More so, because there’s double the data, there’s more to go on. Suddenly you get clearer perspectives, motivation, and insight that can be used to drive more sales.

And there’s many types of co-marketing campaigns, largely depending on industry. For instance, charitable causes help those trying to grow their personal nature-based brands, such as animal rights activists, or forest preservation. Joint webinars help those who provide information and services of almost any kind, like marketing, for instance. Events, like co-branded local meetups, can help game developers who are joining forces to create a game together.

Update and Republish Old Content

When content gets old, people stop reading it. A lot of it just gets buried under all the new content you keep posting, for one thing. But also, the thing about information is that it loses credibility over time, especially if your content is all how-to focused, or information based. Essentially, anything that provides value.

That’s why every few months, it’s a good idea to take a few of these posts and unpublish them. Then read over them and delete anything that isn’t relevant anymore. Add some updated information, since there’s probably plenty of progress that’s been made since the original date of publication. For instance, if you’re writing about tech, and you mentioned Amazon Echo, you could suddenly mention Amazon’s Fire TV Cube, and it’s mixed reviews.

Once you’ve updated your post, go ahead and republish it. This adds relevant information, a breath of life into an old post, and moves it higher in the website’s architecture, so it has more impact.

Remove the Date in Serps/WordPress

You know when you complete a Google search and there’s dates on the left-hand side showing you how old the source is? Well, when it’s over a year old, people tend to not click on them as much. Or even filter them out. To avoid that, you can have that removed, but it does involve some specific steps.

This involves a but of skill, so let someone know if you need help! First, find the function “the_time()” because that is where you’re going to tinker around. Likely, you’ll find it in archive.php, index.php, or single.php.

Next, use an FTP client like Filezilla. Download your WordPress theme files to your computer, and make sure to just copy the folder wp-content/themes/your-active-theme-folder. You don’t need the entire installation.

Now go to Search, Multi-File Search, enter “the_date” in the find field, and click other before navigating to your theme’s folder and selecting it.

At this point, you should be seeing all the files containing “the_time.”

Create An Expert Roundup

If you have plenty of valuable posts chock full of informative, actionable advice, it’s time for an expert roundup. But there’s a catch: it can’t be a fluffy roundup post, because there’s too many of those out there. And frankly, they offer no real value to anyone, not even you.

Instead, create a truly informative roundup, whether it’s actionable, proven advice you swear by, or it’s content about what life is really like behind the scenes, etc. Something readers can really walk away from knowing they learned something new and important. Something that can inspire them, change their minds, or even convince them to try something.

These types of posts get shared heavily on social media, especially Twitter. So it’s a useful tool if you want to generate more engagement, bring traffic to your website, or gain a higher social media following.

Also, if you already have a nice thing going with some influencers, it may be useful to reach out. Ask if they want to participate in your post by answering a simple question you can quote in there, and then link back to their content.

Remember to let them know when it’s going live, and to let them see the quote within the context, prior to publication. You’d be surprised how many edit their answer once they see the full picture.

Get A Column On An Industry Publication

Guest posting is always nice, but you know what’s better? Having your own column. Not only is it an ongoing writing gig that pays, whether financially or in traffic, or both, but it’s also a great way to establish yourself as a prominent voice within your industry.

And that goes for startup founders, anyone trying to grow their personal brand, or creatives who make digital products, like video game developers and app designers.

First look for publications to write for, and use All Top if you want to make the process easier. If you do use it, search for a keyword that’s relevant to your industry and you will see a list of top publications relevant to you.

Now list the ones you want to contact. You can write on a Post It, create a spreadsheet, whatever you want, but remember to jot down the domain name.

When you reach out, make sure you’re clear about wanting to write something ongoing for them. Not everyone will agree, but keep at it. Also, some publications want you to pitch to them first, so it would be wise to have a solid idea all figured out beforehand.

Get Product Reviews Using Influencer Platforms

Influencers open up a vast world of possibilities, but this is something you likely already know. Viewers trust influencers, go to them for recommendations, and insight on products that they’ve been considering purchasing.

So it’s no surprise that companies actively gift influencers free products in exchange for a review. Now, few influencers will accept paid reviews in exchange for kind words, because they know that their job is on the line. If their audience realizes it, they’ll lost credibility, get in to a dramatic situation with their platform, etc.

But that doesn’t mean that you have to brace yourself either. Hopefully, you know your product is good. And everyone will have their own opinion on things, anything, really. What works for one person, doesn’t always work for another person. Ultimately, the best you can do is see what the influencer has to say about the product you spent x amount of time meticulously designing and creating. And if it’s negative feedback, the influencer will likely tell you upfront before anything gets posted.

Two platforms, Famebit and Tomoson enable brands to find influencers to work with and to promote their product range. The price varies depending on the influencers audience size, so keep your budget in mind.

Build Your Content in Topic Clusters

This is when you post relevant content that individually covers smaller themes within an overarching topic.

So, say you’re a game developer who wants to post about what development looks like. You could do a post on the top three things aspiring developers should know, another post on actually getting into the industry, another post on balancing work and leisure time, a top 10 list on advice you’ve learned the hard way since going into development, etc.

Having large groups of content that revolve around the same topic builds more relevance around the keywords you’re trying to rank for. Suddenly, search engines recognize you as a voice to pull up whenever anyone has a query regarding your niche.

Link Reclamation

The great thing about link reclamation is that it can be used by everyone: small business founders, designers, those trying to grow their personal brand, etc. And the reason why this applies to everyone is because all it involves is tracking down mentions.

Whenever someone mentions you, your business, your product/service, or even your content without actually linking it to you, it’s time to get in touch with them, and request that they link back to your website (the original webpage).

Something seemingly simple has shown time and time again that it can elevate your conversion rate, spiking organic traffic, and boosting your SEO plan.

But how exactly does one find out when there’s an unlinked mention anyway?

Use the Right Tools to Find Brand Mentions

Tools like Mention and BuzzSumo offer free versions that allow you to set up alerts by adding keywords related to your brand, your products or services, or even yourself.

To optimize this, exclude mentions from your own website, something you can typically do within the setting options. Also, remember to separate keywords out.

Set Up Email Alerts

Then it’s time to manage your notifications, another thing you can do within settings usually. Select the option that gets you a daily digest email, of sorts. That way you don’t have to get a notification of every single time someone mentions you—it’s all consolidated instead.

This can be lifesaving for those who actively get mentions on a daily basis, as their notifications would quickly get overwhelming.

With a daily digest email, you get everything you need, so that you can check for links.

Use Plugins to Check For Links

As much as you probably want to go one by one, manually checking for links (you don’t), there is a method of bulk checking and saving precious time.

Assuming you’ve created an Excel spreadsheet and copied and pasted the information from the daily digest email, you can use the SEO Tools Plugin to perform a bulk check for links.

If you really want to go the manual way, you’d have to click into each webpage, view the page source, and then search for your domain name within your browser using “CTRL+F.” If it’s not in the HTML of the webpage, it’s not linked to you… yet.

Reach Out

Reaching out takes three mini steps, all of which are easy, and one of which is a one-time effort. Let’s lay it all out:

#1 Write An Email Template

Writing an email template allows you to copy and paste what you wrote into each and every email you send out to people who have mentioned you. Of course, there will be some information that changes for each, but all in all, it’s a time-saving practice. Otherwise, you’d be forced to write original copy for each mention, which if you get several of in a day, you’d be in big trouble.

Try something along the lines of:

“Hi ________,

Thank you for mentioning __________ within your article, it means so much!

However, I noticed that you didn’t link us in the mention, is there any chance you’d be willing to update the post with the link? To save you time, please use this link: ____________.

Thanks, and if you ever need further information about ________, don’t hesitate to ask. We can supply you with images, videos, or whatever else may suit your articles.

Thanks!

___________”

#2 Find Contact Information

Once you’ve written out an email you can keep reusing, it’s time to start reaching out. But to do that, you’ll need a way to actually make contact.

Although you could reach out to the website owner, your best bet is to reach out to the actual author of the piece that mentions you.

To do this, look at their contact and “about us” pages. If they don’t list an email or anything, try using a tool like BuzzStream, which extracts contact data for you. Another option is to use Email Generator, designed by the MailTrack Team.

Ideally, you want to reach out to the person who manages the content. To do this, skim the blog posts to find who is listed as the author most frequently. To verify that you have the right person, search for their content manager on LinkedIn. If they are, add them to your list.

Note, this only works half the time. Other times, there’s no author listed on the posts, or there’s multiple authors published equally. For these situations, go to their LinkedIn company page and click “see all # employees on LinkedIn.” The resulting list has job titles, which should help to simplify everything.

If for any reason there’s a few people who seem like they could be managing the content, it’s time to dig even deeper. Click into each person, browse their experience and search for mentions of content managing for blogs.

Once you have the information you need (name) add it to the spreadsheet. Ideally, you want the blog name on the far left, the domain rating in the center, and the person of contact on the right.

Finally, find the email address to contact each person. Tools like Voila Norbert or Hunter make this step easy.

Note: Secondary Contacts

It’s no secret that focusing on the companies and blogs that are the best fits for promotion is the way to go. The big ones, with the most engagement.

But content promotion and link building increases your success rate, especially if you reach out to a secondary person if your first target doesn’t respond.

If you’re unsure of who the higher-ups are, use LinkedIn. Go to the company page, click on employees, and note the first page’s results.

Then drop them into the same sequence you put the first round of targets on.

#3 Send An Email

The final step is an obvious one: send an email. But you want to do this as soon as possible, ideally within the first day or two after they publish a post that mentions you. The reason being that during the first few days of publication, visibility and traffic are higher, especially if the authors are mentioning the post on social media, drawing traffic to it. As time goes on, the interest in that post wanes, as new content is being uploaded.

Another reason why you want to reach out quickly is because the author will likely have other content to tend to. The longer you wait, the more the post subsides in their mind. Ideally, you want to reach out when that article is still fresh on their mind, just to make their lives easier.

And after you send out your emails, it may be helpful to keep track of who responds back, and who doesn’t. Is your email template effective, or does it need to be revised? What’s the conversion rate? Weigh the answers and react accordingly.

#4 After the Response

Because your request/ask is easy, most people will respond fairly quickly. When they do, you should reply with three things:

A thank you

A timeline for when you’ll publish

A note that you’ll send them from their section before it goes live so they can approve it

This keeps them in control of what gets published and keeps them informed on when to expect the next step.

Before the article goes live, follow up with their section, giving them a few days to get back to you with any edits.

Note, this sparks the conversation up again, giving them a reason to reply. Seeing how you did what you said you’d do establishes trust and reliability. Combined, it sets the tone moving forward, and increases the likelihood that they’d work with you again.

Just make sure to send them an email the morning of publication with the link, and offer to make any last-minute changes. Then request to share it on their social media.

Community Hijacking

Community hijacking is when you find online communities that are made up of your target market, build a relationship with them, and then get them to promote your content, brand, products, services, etc.

It also counts if you find a community made up of people who have access to your target market.

Setting The Scene

For instance, for the sake of illustration, say you run your own bakery. You sell donuts, cupcakes, tarts, danishes, brownies, etc. You even sell coffee and tea. Maybe you donate part of your profits to a cause, such as children’s literacy.

So then you find a community on Instagram that is all about pastries and coffee. That’s all they post and often times, you see books being displayed on these well-arranged, beautifully set-up coffee tables, right beside cupcakes and tarts.

Then you notice that many of these accounts are linking to their favorite coffee shop and bakery websites. Some even link to literacy causes, because clearly, this is a community of like-minded people… who just happen to be your target audience.

Collect The Data

To increase your chances of success, make a list of the popular accounts within that community. There are very intricate ways of doing this using tools like Screaming Frog SEO Spider, and data scraping, but if you want to be less intense about it, go ahead and just start following several of these accounts. You’ll quickly learn who gets the most mentions, who has the most followers, the better content, and even who posts the most.

Reach Out

To keep things cost effective, focus on users that are located as close to you as possible. Preferably local, as this will further increase the chances of working together. Politely explain who you are, why you’re reaching out, and how you found them. Then ask if they’d be willing to use one of your items in a post, and link to the product (it helps to have product links, and if you really do run a bakery, an online menu).

Of course, don’t ask for handouts. You want to ask how much they’d charge for the work, offer in the free product, and then ask when they’d post it.

Keep Track Of Community Accounts

Once you reach out to people, it may be helpful to make a spreadsheet of them. Their names, links to their profiles, and basic information like follower count and average posts per day will come in handy when fighting for time during a busy schedule. Having that information readily available makes things run smoothly.

But don’t forget to add some essential columns: replied, willing to work together, and unwilling. This will allow you to keep track of anyone you’ve already reached out to, so you don’t make the mistake of bothering them again. And it helps you know which type of accounts are more likely to work with you. It helps you hone in even further on your target audience, thus making it possible to more accurately select who to reach out to in the first place.

Boosting Underperforming Content

Even though websites publish post after post, and amass a ton of valuable content, a large percentage of most website organic traffic comes from a few posts, at most. This is because most organic traffic focuses on quality posts, not so much filler content.

Logically, that means the more value you provide in each post, the higher the quality of your content, and the more organic traffic you receive.

Find Easily Improved Posts

If you open Google Search Console, go to “Search Analytics” and then “Clicks”, “Impressions” and “Position”, you will see the keywords that bring in the most traffic to your website. Your objective is to find keywords that are between 10 and 25.

Pick a keyword and then click “Pages” to see which page the keyword is ranked for. The results should point to a nicely ranked page. That is the type of content you want.

Connect The Posts Internally

So next, look up the posts where you mention that keyword, and add an internal link that connects that high-ranking page to the lower-ranking one. Suddenly, the boost from an association with a popular page will catapult your low-ranking post to a good rank in search results.

Once you’re done adding the links, read the copy over. Is there anything else you could add that could make the post more valuable? Any other links you could add that connect it to more high-ranking content? And check for things like keywords within title tags and H1 headings.

Keep Track Of Your Progress

It may help to use tools like Accuranker to keep track of keywords. After all, if you’re using several of them, or testing out new ones that show potential, you’re going to want to keep tabs on all of them. It would also be useful to rank them according to traffic. Which keywords prove the most effective.

If you do use Accuranker, upload your keywords and tag them. Then you’ll get weekly, or even daily reports, depending on your setting preferences. Once you see the data, you’ll know which keywords to focus on, which to eliminate, and which to try boosting through internal linking to popular pages.

Measure Your Site Speed

Believe it or not, even small variations in page speed and load times can have effects on its ranking. The reason being, of course, that people don’t like waiting too long for their content to be loaded. In fact, it shouldn’t take more than 2 seconds.

If that number spikes up to 5 seconds, the bounce rate goes up by 90%. Just one second more, at 6 seconds, and that percentage goes up to 106%.

In today’s modern age of instant access to shows, to movies, and video games, movies, even beverages and food, a slow website isn’t an option anymore. Because if your website is slow, there’s always another site that will provide the needed information in less than half the time.

Enter your web page URL (homepage is a good gauge of your website speed in general).

Once it’s done analyzing, you should see your optimization rate for both mobile and desktop.

Scroll down and there should be a list of issues with your web page with information on how to fix them. Click to see details.

Test other inner pages, important ones like sales pages.

Pay attention to the differences between mobile and desktop variations.

Google Author Tags for Multiple Author Sites

Why would anyone need to add Google author tags for multiple author websites? Because it is the act of letting Google know you’re the author of the content you publish online. The HTML markup code known as rel=author is all you need to dramatically impact how your content appears on search results.

Because Google uses rel=author to include a picture of the content’s author, it’s important that you tailor your Google+ in the way you want to be reflected. When readers see your image below a post and click into it, they’ll be directed to the rest of the posts you’ve written.

How to Do It

Let’s set the scene: you wrote post A, but a guest author wrote post B. You need to link to the individual author profile from each post (do as follows for each post).

Moving forward, every author who contributes to your website needs to add a link to your site in the contributor section of their Google Plus profile.

Securing WordPress

Before moving forward, let’s tackle what you’re already thinking: security isn’t an SEO tactic. You’re right. But when a website lacks security, and gets hacked or worse, that has an effect on your SEO ranking. At the end of the day, you want to make sure your website doesn’t have a security problem, or else, you’ll have an array of issues, from SEO to financial.

So there are a few things you can do about security, assuming you have a WordPress website. These are all code based, so if you don’t feel comfortable with it all, feel free to ask someone trusted for help.

Security

You’re going to need to access your .htaccess file to do this, so again, if you require assistance, make sure to get it now.

Add this code above #Begin Wordpress. When you’re done, it should look exactly as it looks below:

What this does is it blocks outside access to your “include” file directories.

If you want this to work for a multi-author website, just remove the following line:

RewriteRule ^wp-includes/[^/]+\.php$ - [F,L]

Your WP-Config.php File

WP-config.php is where your username and password is installed. Assuming you don’t want to move files around, use this code in the .htaccess file.

Put this at the top of the .htaccess file to blog anyone trying to open it with their browser.

<files wp-config.php>order allow,denydeny from all</files>

Change Your File Permissions

Run these two commands to change file permissions. You’ll need shell access to the server.

For directories:

find /path/to/your/wordpress/install/ -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;

For files:

find /path/to/your/wordpress/install/ -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;

Using SEO Smart Link

Internal linking is the act of linking from page to page within your own website. It’s seen when you’re reading a blog post, click on a link within that post, and find yourself taken to another relevant post in the same website.

And while internal link building is critical in the world of SEO, giving older, lesser ranking content more visibility, and hence boosting your website ranking, there’s still one problem:

As time goes on, these posts get further from the homepage, so they get buried.

The only real way to avoid that is to consistently link to them from new posts and pages. And that’s where the SEO Smart Links plugin comes in. This plugin makes it easier to internal link to older posts.

Setting Up

Under Internal Links, you’ll see some options and a line explaining that SEO Smart Links can process your posts, pages, and comments. Select posts, pages and under excluding, select “prevent linking in heading tags.”

Next, choose Targets and Settings. You want “Target Posts Only” unless you have pages really important to you.

“Process only simple posts” and “process RSS feeds” are also good ideas.

Under “Ignore posts and pages” and “ignore keywords” you can ask it to ignore certain content when lining. Many people put contact and about in there.

Link Building

Now you’re going to add specific posts that should be linked to when specific keywords appear. This is how your older content will get linked without you having to do it all manually every time. Under “Custom Keywords” you’ll click “prevent duplicate links for grouped keywords, and then you’ll start adding in keywords and the URL.

Enter as many keywords as you want, comma separated, and enter the URL you want them to link to.

Do this for every post you want to control.

Setting Limits

Then it’s time to set limits. Under the “Limits” menu, set the number of max links (3-5 is optimal).

Max Single and Max Signal URLs should be at 1.

Finally, select “open in a new window” so that your audience is more likely to navigate back to your newer content afterwards.

Twitter Advanced Listening

Ask any marketer and they’ll tell you how important social media is. It’s a way to get the pulse on what’s going on, on what people are thinking. Whether it’s about the new breakfast joint on the corner, or a massive news report, everyone is reacting to something, suggesting something, or recommending a new product or service. Especially with influencers running around.

And at the center of it all, is Twitter. While other platforms like Instagram are more about visuals, and things like fashion or even food, Twitter is about everything, visual or not. Information doesn’t disappear after 10 seconds like with Snapchat. It’s far more readable than Tumblr.

And yes, you can incorporate SEO into Twitter. Here’s how:

Making A Keyword List

Before setting up searches, it’s necessary to make a list of variations that have to do with your niche. If your main topic is game design, it would be…

gamedevelopment

game development

#gamedev

#gamedevelopment

game design

Gamedesign

Then you’d have a list of words for intent like…

Help

Tips

Question

Launch

New

Upcoming

Releases

Indie

And if it’s location based…

Seattle

WA

Washington

And finally, your brand. Say you’re running a business called Gamer Tech and your name is Bill Simmons…

bill simmons

gamertech

gamer tech

gamer tech seattle

Create And Test Your Advanced Search

Good searches have a few solid results in the last 24-48 hours. You’re looking for activity that is relevant to what you’re looking for. If you type in a search and nothing really pops up, it’s not a good search.

Ideally, you want at least 3-4 relevant searches in the last two days. Fresh activity is key, since it makes it likely you’ll have more to track.

The IFTTT Recipe

Once you find searches you want to keep monitoring, create an IFTTT recipe to watch for them. You’ll receive an alert across a few platforms, which is nice. You’ll get an email or text when an alert is triggered.

Create a free account and make a new recipe. Use Twitter as the trigger.

Fill out the search field. For instance “seattle indie game design.” Then click “create trigger.”

Select either email or Gmail as the action channel.

Fill out the fields and customize as needed: you’ll be filling out which email you want the alert sent to, what subject line you want it to use, etc.

Select if you want to receive a text message and set your action fields.

Wait for emails to come in. This is the hardest step of all, since it requires patience. Note: if it takes too long, and you’re not getting any alerts for days, it’s time to revise the search repeat all the steps listed with the exception of step one).

But that’s not the only tool you can use for Twitter. To connect multiple platforms together to automate things, use ifttt. To set up multiple categories, or columns, and track Twitter searches as they go through live, use monitter. If you want to see the popular articles picking up steam and being shared, use Tweet Meme. And to get all the mentions of your brand, you, or anything else you want emailed to you, like of like IFTTT, use Tweet Beep.

Measure And Track Success

Each month, check up on:

Direct Navigation - traffic as a result of searches, bookmarks and email links without tracking codes.

Search Traffic - queries that sent traffic from a search engine. Compare the contribution of each search engine with its estimated market share.

This will help you pinpoint any issues if your traffic were to drop. For instance, if one search engine drops off, it’s clearly an issue with that search engine’s ranking system. You’re not doing something specific. If all traffic from all search engines drops off, then it’s an accessibility issue.

Conversion Rates

Check your rankings to see where you stand amongst the competition. If others rank higher, sift through and see what it is they’re doing/providing that you’re not.

Conversion rates will also let you know which website page people are landing on the most. Is it the landing page, a specific post, or the store page? Whatever it is, you can improve it to increase conversions. Because if people are landing on it only to back out, then you have some improvements to make.

Some common site improvements are:

Layout - top left is critical, that’s where your call-to-action should be.

Design - Sleek websites that clearly provide all information in a way that is searchable even by skimming eyes do very well.

Multimedia - Walls of text don’t convert well. Instead, try using spaces, infographics, videos, images, and even audio to provide further information along with your copy.

Deciding the Next Steps

Obviously, there is plenty that you can do in terms of SEO and content marketing that can get you ahead of the game. It's all about the timing. Although a step may be valuable in itself, it may be used at the worst of times, making it anything but successful.

The question here is, which tactics are the best for your business right now? What drew you to your conclusions?

Leave a comment below with your answer, would love to get some feedback on what you found the most helpful!

About The Author

With over half a decade of experience in CRO and copywriting, Daniel has been building brands, growing communities, and directing marketing strategy for hundreds of venture-backed startups, creatives, and companies worldwide.